Eurobloat #0009 • January 2011
January 2011 opened with the Union promoting itself to schoolmaster of the continent, marking the homework of national treasuries, while across the Mediterranean the regimes it had quietly courted began to fall.
Folly of the Month: The European Semester, in which Brussels grades your budget
On 12 January the Commission published its first Annual Growth Survey and fired the starting gun on the inaugural European Semester, a tidy arrangement under which member states now submit their draft budgets to Brussels for marking before their own parliaments get a proper look. The Commission tabled ten priority actions and a great deal of language about coordination, which is the word used when power moves quietly from a capital to a committee. The genius of the scheme is that nobody voted for a headmaster, yet here one is, red pen in hand. Sovereignty was not abolished, merely placed on report.
1. Three new supervisors arrive, because two dozen national ones were clearly not enough
On 1 January the European Banking Authority, the European Securities and Markets Authority and the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority all opened for business, planted in London, Paris and Frankfurt. The crisis had been caused, we were told, by too little Europe, so the remedy was three more agencies with letterheads.
2. Estonia joins the euro just as the lifeboats are being lowered
On 1 January Estonia became the seventeenth member of the single currency, a club then busy passing the bucket round Greece and Ireland. Joining the eurozone in early 2011 was rather like booking a cabin on a ship whose band had already struck up something solemn.
3. The Commission opens fire on the country chairing its own meetings
Hungary took the rotating presidency on 1 January, and within days Vice-President Neelie Kroes had launched a verification procedure into its new media law against the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. The Union thus spent the month publicly grading the member state it had just handed the gavel, which is one way to make a presidency memorable.
4. Ben Ali's assets frozen, once he had stopped being useful
On 31 January EU foreign ministers agreed to freeze the assets of the ousted Tunisian president, his wife and their circle. The same Union had spent years treating his regime as a respectable partner, and the speed of the freeze was matched only by the speed with which everyone forgot they had ever shaken his hand.
5. The consultation that built the case for a single data regime closes
The public consultation on overhauling the 1995 Data Protection Directive shut on 15 January, the paperwork that Commissioner Reding would later turn into one continent-wide rulebook. It was sold as protecting your privacy; the lasting achievement was moving the rules from your capital to hers.
6. Brussels writes the rules for your sandwich box
Commission Regulation (EU) No 10/2011 of 14 January set out a Union list of permitted substances for plastics that touch food, governing everything from packaging to cutlery to the surface you butter your toast on. The migration limit is ten milligrams per square decimetre, a figure no shopper requested and few could pronounce.
7. The Single Market Act, or fifty proposals in search of a problem
The Commission spent January promoting its Single Market Act, a bundle of some fifty proposals offered up for debate to revive growth by deepening, harmonising and integrating yet further. Whenever the single market needs reviving, the prescription is reliably more single market.
8. Your bank transfers, still flowing to Washington
The transatlantic arrangement letting the United States Treasury trawl European SWIFT financial records under the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme rolled on, with the first joint review of the deal due in February. The Union had signed away a continent's banking data and installed a single official to watch the searches, which is oversight in the way a doorman is a fortress.
→ edri.org
9. Brussels goes to market to pay Ireland's bills
On 5 January the Commission, acting for the Union under the new European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism, placed its very first bond in the capital markets, a five billion euro issue raised against the budgets of every member state to fund the Irish bailout. The continent that had been told the euro needed no central treasury now had Brussels borrowing on behalf of the lot, the joint liability arriving years before anyone admitted that was the plan.
→ economy-finance.ec.europa.eu
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